Transnational Youth Initiative Urban Culture for rural development is a 24-month project of young creative volunteers from Črnomelj (Slovenia) and Novi Marof (Croatia). Project Urban Culture for rural development was created on the basis of evaluation of four-year long project The Concert Cycle of the Youth Cultural Club of Bela Krajina, coordinated by MC BIT. Evaluation has shown that the present form of delivering an alternative culture on the countryside is no longer in the step with youth. That's why young people, working as volunteers, joined the organization and started to organize (mostly music) events. As part of the Erasmus + projects, we have worked closely with the organization from Novi Marof, which works in a similar environment to ours and has a well-developed alternative culture field for Croatian circumstances. Both, Slovenians and Croatians are facing similar problems. All the activities in the project are developed on basis of wishes and needs of participants. The main objectives of the project are: - to closen-up urban creative culture to young people, - convince decision-makers on the local level to support the creativity of young people throughtout urban culture, which will influence the development of rural areas and change the attitude of general public in rural areas towards urban culture, - empower young volunteers for quality youth work (especially in the organizational and communication field), - give young people good start for independent creative and free expression, - to increase the flow and networking of creators and visitors in the border areas. Main expected results in the project are: - a detailed analysis of the needs of young people in the field of urban culture, - Two projects designed to strengthen local community (involving young people in the project itself and in organizing events), - developed communication strategy for quality information flow about cultural events, - open online space for networking of cultural creative young people on both sides of the border, - new urban cultural events that will be developed during the project and will be supported by the project, - the empowerment of young people participating in this project for quality work with young people focusing on urban culture, - two short handbooks for young volunteers which will help in organizing cultural events, - two developed strategies for the development of urban culture till 2023 for the municipalities of Črnomelj and Novi Marof, - Increased flow of young creative people into coworking and start up community. The learning process will be focused on acquiring three key competences: productivity, curiosity and persistence. Within these competences the participants will strengthen: efficiency, analytical ability, solving problems, reliability, creativity, interest in new, cooperation, flexibility, communication skills, language skills, self-awareness, perseverance, empathy and self-confidence. The participants in this project are not passive observers in the learning process, but will be with special active approach guided to grow as a person. After the project finishes, the participants will be empowered for quality youth work in the field of development of urban and alternative culture. Urban field and creativity are very connected so we also want to increase the involvement of young people with the entrepreneurial incubator (coworking and start up community) as the launch of every new project cannot be done without creativity. We want to carry out the project transnationally, because we believe that in the current situation, interculturality in smaller disadvantaged areas needs to be promoted. These kinds of areas are even more prone to raise intolerance and radicalization due to the distance from the centers of power and money. We also want to compare our similar environment, learn and complement each other.
In the project Urban Culture for Rural Development, we performed a detailed analysis of the needs of young people in Bela krajina and in Novi Marof in the field of urban culture. We carried out activities to strengthen the internal community by involving young people in planning traditional summer events (Črnfest in Črnomelj / ŠIC na BIC in Novi Marof ). We have developed a communication strategy that can be used in the future to disseminate information about the activities and events of organizations. We have created a website for networking of cultural creators and promoters of cultural content, from which productive collaborations have already developed. We have supported the youth initiative for hip hop and electronic events that we conducted in 2018 and 2019 and will continue to do so when conditions allow. We conducted three educational workshops in high schools. In the future, we will continue the practice of inclusion in formal education, as every year more young people need suitable space for expression and knowledge and different experiences for personal growth. Young people who were involved in the project have learned how to include elements of urban culture in youth work in innovative ways - graffiti as an expressive drawing, brainstorming as rap lyrics on a musical background. In further work, local youth will benefit most from the manual to help them organize cultural events, which has systematically covered each area and we created it with the help of new volunteers who are just getting acquainted with the planning of the event. In the application, we stated that we would like to have developed strategies for the development of urban culture until 2023 in both environments, but we did not develop strategies to the extent that it would be useful in practice, as during the project events on the cultural scene due to the epidemic are completely stalled and it was impossible to predict when the implementation of cultural events would be feasible again and in what way the epidemic would have a long-term impact on performers and users of cultural events as well as on society at large. The results of the analysis in the field of urban culture among young people, which we performed as part of the project, will be used in the development of a strategy for young people in the Municipality of Črnomelj (2022-2027), which will be developed in 2021. Our team member successfully carried out its start-up project on Kickstarter, so that we also achieved the expected result of the flow of young creatives into the coworking/startup community, and we also work with this community in the field of digital literacy of young people.